Eskew by Episode: 9, 10, 11

In which we offer commentary, anecdotes & random thoughts on every episode of I Am In Eskew.

Follow along with us as we go!

Episode 9: Respite

In which David finds himself resting up at the Hotel of the Blessed Saint Bartholomew.

How it came to be

So a funny story with this episode. It was written and released later on in the series than it chronologically appears (I think perhaps after Episode 10 or 11?).

But we thought it might be fun, and different, and in keeping with the general disorientation of the show, if we dropped in an episode out of order.

The idea was that listeners would get an update from their podcast feeds, but that there wouldn’t be a new episode visible when they checked - however, the eagle-eyed audience member would then scroll back and see a mysterious older ep with the description, ‘Strange. You don’t remember listening to this one.’

Some people really did love it! But then for others, it just temporarily broke their podcast feed.

And now obviously, other than a confusing rewind sound effect in the intro, there’s no way of telling.

We honestly didn’t expect the show to have the longevity that it’s had. So we were just trying to think of fun stuff that we could do for listeners at the time.

From the Fish Market to St Barts

Funnily enough, St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London is very close to Smithfields Market in London. So the nightmare-universe geography holds up.

I don’t think I particularly had it in mind as a thematical parallel or anything, but the real-life St Bartholomew had a pretty gnarly life - after being flensed, or flayed alive as a martyr, he’s since become the patron saint of leather-workers. (Which I, personally, would take as the final insult after the fact, but hey.)

Catch-22

A lot of elements in this episode are homaging Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - for instance, the patient who’s completely swathed in bandages, the doctors who diagnose any injury with the same rote instructions, and the argument from the old gentleman at the start that getting injured or sick in order to stay in the hospital is effectively a technical loophole to get out of the cycles of Eskew’s horror - because this is a place that follows rules rather than reason.

There are quite a few Catch-22 references throughout Eskew, in fact; Kenneth, when he turns up in a few episodes’ time, is an outright rip-off of Orr from that book - this annoying, persistent sidekick character who turns out to have been heroically building his own escape plan out of sight the entire time.

It might seem like a weird reference for a horror podcast, but it’s one of my absolute favourite novels, and David’s eventual narrative in trying to resist or escape Eskew does mirror Yossarian’s story in many ways.

It also contains one genuinely heart-stopping moment of visual, gory horror - thanks to a low-flying plane and a swimmer - that will last with me as long as anything that exists more formally in the genre.

And Now, An Apology

I think by this point part of me was definitely experimenting to see how gross I could go with certain descriptions. Hence the very unloved line where David is ‘pissed, milked like cattle’. Sorry.

Final Verdict

I do like this episode. It’s the constant escalation to the point of absurdity and monstrosity that feels so true to the spirit of the wider series.

The city accepts that the hospital is a place of recovery. So patients start to gather there, refusing to come out. So the city begins producing nurses and doctors to drag them back out. So the patients mould the nurses and doctors into a colossal abomination to fight for their cause.

I also think I just like the silliness of the Graft itself. It’s a big rolling ball of flesh that sucks you in! We don’t do a huge amount of creature-focused horror in this show, and most of the monsters are variations on the same chalk-faced wraith, so this felt like a fun departure.

Episode 10: Performance

In which David goes on a date to the theatre.

Hope and Despair

OK, this episode, about eight hours in, is where the plot starts to finally kick in! And also we start to worry over the horrors of hope versus the tragedy of despair, which becomes a recurring concern.

Eskew is a very Ligottian show, and Thomas Ligotti is a pessimist who understands human consciousness and identity as false pursuits by hopeless, hollow things in a horrific and orderless universe.

But I’m also a huge, huge fan of Samuel Beckett, who makes the more (to me) reasonable argument that despair is unsustainable, that the human experience is about atrophy, with genuine annihilation remaining an unknown, and that we will inevitably pick ourselves up out of the stagnant mud and continue to drag ourselves onwards in pursuit of something, even if that something is an ending, because there’s simply no other option (he doesn’t argue that this is a good thing, crucially).

So I suppose I’m just ramming those toy cars together a bit and trying to see which one comes out on top.

No More Tindr, No More Hinge

Reading back through this, I’m not sure I realised just how blatantly this episode is about dating in general, the coded language of understanding that gradually develops between you and the other person as you talk about total bullshit and anxiously try to guess at whether they will comprehend your deeper fears and anxieties and wants with sympathy, or with scorn.

Pretending at normality while you try to figure out if this is someone who could safely understand you, or just another stranger. And when you fail, you go back to try again, in this larger, frantic cycle of hope and despair.

I’m very happy to be married to Muna, put it that way.

I also really struggle with ambient noise, which means that pretty much any social interaction in a public venue consists of me faking it, nodding politely and trying to make the right noises as I strain to follow the tune and rhythm of a conversation, the actual meaning remaining entirely out of reach.

So the scene in the restaurant, with David trying to ignore the jazz piano, that’s very much me.

Beginnings

This episode merges two of the flash fictions that I originally wrote, which ended up becoming Eskew:

"I hate going out like this," Lisa said. "It's so constraining."

I watched her from the bed, enraptured, as she slipped her skin and hair on over raw and pleasured flesh.

I enjoyed the play, but was unprepared for what came next; the actors following us home down the lamplit streets, walking in perfect diagonal formation, unsmiling beneath their masks.

We’ve drawn the shutters, but we can still hear them clapping.

The big climax

I always had it in mind that this episode is a rare attempt at actual benevolence from Eskew. It picks up on what David’s doing and how much he’s struggling, and it genuinely tries to give him a date - a performance, people around them to form the audience - but inevitably this goes wrong.

This is why it perhaps feels like a bit of an easy win for the protagonists at the end here, with applause ending the ‘play’. It’s not meant to be a conscious assault on them so much as an accidental reality spillage (the audience members fixating wrongly on David and Allegra as performers, until they’re given a reason to stop).

I was probably day-dreaming of the very good Doctor Who episode with the mummy on the train, where the appropriate call also leads to the right response at the last possible second.

Episode 11: Product

David starts his first day at a new job.

Sorry, Tom L

This is the episode I’m proudest of. I know it’s not necessarily the most representative of the tone of the series as a whole - it’s a good bit wackier and more openly satirical - but it just works for me and makes me laugh quite a lot.

It’s also funny that in a series where I repeatedly claim Thomas Ligotti as a major influence, this is maybe the first episode that clearly maps back to his work, in particular the corporate horror of My Work Is Not Yet Done. Am I just full of shit? Yes, probably.

My inspiration

I’ve always worked in marketing & communications.

It’s a great field in some ways if you have creative pretences, because you can always kid yourself that you’ve found a way to meld your love of the art with your need to make a living.

But so much of my career experience has ended up being very much like this. A group of people in a room, anxiously trying to talk their way around some awful and useless instruction that’s descended from on high.

Building up processes around it like scaffolding in the hope that this will achieve something. Terrified that it’ll reflect badly on us if we’re unable to do...something...with whatever we’ve been handed.

I’m sure if you were so inclined, you could make the argument that there’s a pretty crude and sophomoric representation of corporate capitalism in this episode, and that we need to be thinking about these things with more nuance.

On the other hand, 2020 was the year when the UK Government took the time during a deadly pandemic to tell its citizens they had a duty to stop working from home and begin going back into the offices to feed the economy and support commercial landlords, so fuck ‘em.

Also, reader, I once was that person who fails to get a positive response to my idea during a work brainstorm, but defiantly writes it on the whiteboard anyway. God, that’s shameful.

Vander-more references here

There’s a string of homages to Annihilation in Riyo’s arc from here on out, but there’s an obvious one in this episode as well, with the squabbling collective defined only by their job titles attempting to make sense of the inexplicable.

Sorry for the silly

I remember getting to the halfway point with this episode and becoming worried by the fact that the structure from here on out was looking too predictable. 

Once the first character goes into the sack, we know things are going to escalate, and that others will be swallowed up one by one until there's nobody left.

I think I tried to address this challenge by just escalating the hysteria and bizarreness of the entire thing as eccentrically as I possibly could, to ensure the reader is caught off-guard as much as possible.

David suiting up for the final showdown with armour made out of office stationary is wacky logic even by the rest of the show’s standards, but it’s all in good fun.

Next time, we meet Kenneth and discuss spatial horror with Professor Henley.